Why Blue Is the Color Everyone Knows

The blue British Shorthair is the breed’s calling card. It is a solid blue-grey, warm rather than steely, with copper or gold eyes and no trace of tabby markings. It was the color the breed was built on, it is still the one most people come looking for, and it is what we mostly raise.

Blue is not a separate kind of cat. It is black, diluted. The same dilution turns chocolate into lilac, red into cream and cinnamon into fawn. Once you know that, the whole color chart stops looking like a list and starts looking like pairs.

The Solid Colors

A solid British Shorthair should be one color from root to tip, with no ghost tabby rings and no white hairs mixed through. The CFA breed standard recognizes white, black, blue, chocolate, lilac, red and cream as solids, with cinnamon and fawn listed separately as AOV rather than championship colors.

Blue — the classic. Even blue-grey, copper or gold eyes.

Lilac — a soft pinkish grey, noticeably warmer than blue. Dilute chocolate.

Chocolate — a rich warm brown, even to the roots.

Black — dense coal black with no rusting. Gold or copper eyes, never green.

Cream — pale buff, dilute red. Hard to breed without faint tabby markings showing through.

Red — deep and warm. Also prone to ghost markings.

White — pure white, and the one color where eyes vary: deep sapphire blue, gold, copper, or one of each.

The Patterns

Tabby

Three versions are recognized: classic, with the wide swirls and the oyster mark on the flank; mackerel, with narrow vertical stripes; and spotted, where those stripes break into spots. Brown tabby is the familiar one, but tabby comes on a silver base too, which lifts the ground color and usually brings green or hazel eyes instead of copper.

Bicolor and calico

Any solid color paired with white. A good bicolor has the white placed evenly, not scattered. Calico and dilute calico are the tortoiseshell version of the same idea, and both are allowed odd eyes.

Tortoiseshell

Black and red mingled, or in the dilute form, blue and cream. Chocolate tortoiseshell and lilac-cream round out the group. Almost always female, for the same genetic reason it is in every other breed.

Smoke, shaded and chinchilla

These are the ones people mistake for a different breed. The hair is pale at the root and colored at the tip, so the cat looks solid standing still and silver when it moves. Smoke is the most heavily colored, chinchilla the least, shaded in between. Silver blacks and blues carry green to blue-green eyes; the golden versions are a warmer apricot base.

Colorpoint

Pale body, darker face, ears, legs and tail, and blue eyes. This is where the registries part company, and it is worth knowing before you buy. TICA accepts pointed British Shorthairs in all colors. The CFA standard disqualifies any evidence of the Himalayan pattern, so a pointed cat cannot be shown as a British Shorthair there. The cat is no less healthy and no less a British Shorthair to live with — it simply cannot be shown under every association.

Eye Color Follows the Coat

Eye color is not a free choice, and a breeder who tells you otherwise is guessing. The solid colors — blue, black, chocolate, lilac, red and cream — should have gold or copper eyes. Silver shaded and chinchilla blacks and blues carry green to blue-green. Silver tabbies run green or hazel. Whites can be sapphire blue, gold, copper or odd-eyed. Colorpoints are blue-eyed, always.

Kitten eyes do not settle until somewhere around three to four months. Any photo of an eight-week-old kitten with brilliant copper eyes has either been edited or is not eight weeks old.

Does Color Change the Price?

It does, though less than the internet suggests. Blue sits in the middle because it is the most bred. Lilac, chocolate and the rarer patterns sit higher, mostly because fewer catteries produce them. Color is the last thing that should decide your choice — temperament, health and how the kitten was raised matter far more over fifteen years. Our full breakdown is on the kitten price guide.

What We Breed

We work mainly in blue and lilac. That is a deliberate narrowing rather than a limitation: two colors done properly, from lines we know, beats a catalog of everything. If you are set on a color we do not raise, say so and we will tell you honestly rather than put you on a list for something that may never come.

British Shorthair Colors and Patterns